VALE ABRAÃO / VAL ABRAHAM

When it comes to Vale Abraão, much has been said about the pursuit of the “eternal feminine”, already present in Manoel de Oliveira’s first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial, and all the others, without exception. Vale Abraão is also a film about the deep Douro river. And the film of a woman of “threatening beauty,” Ema (the role of a lifetime for Leonor Silveira), undoubtedly the blending of all the Oliveira heroines, and more. Oliveira might contradict us. The feminine mystery is not universal: it changes from one woman to another. He might say that nothing is certain and that no one can know the secret, much less shoot it. He would say that woman is the mother of Mankind. She is Earth and man is Sword. To find out more about her, he sought Agustina Bessa-Luís, who helped him. It’s Oliveira who suggested Agustina update the Bovary of Flaubert with her (woman’s) pen, in the Douro she knew better than anyone, without confusing novel and film. Agustina wrote the dense, sublime novel almost without dialogues, already knowing that Oliveira was going to adapt it and violate it, obviously: this remote working relationship between them had never been so symbiotic. He also found that because of this combination, the feminine paradigm would change in his work. The feminine “Val” also had the masculine “Abraham”. And both lead us, for the first time in a very clear way in this work, to the Platonic myth of the Androgyne. “Vale Abraão” is the Oliveira film in which love is no longer the privilege of women nor sex that of men. Because this Ema made of fire, who gives herself to her husband, then to her lovers, without loving them and without asking for anything, is Earth and Sword at once, she was born that way. This is the Bovary of the “swinging soul” whom men love to distraction but never understand. Not the Bovary of Flaubert, but the sacred one of Agustina and Oliveira. Only the river – the Douro, always – could welcome her, her torments, her ecstasies, all that desire. (FF)